Event

Aswin Punathambekar

New Ethnicities, Again: Notes on Diasporic Worldmaking in a Digital Era

Given the continual and savvy recognition by the state and the media industries of various kinds of social and cultural difference, how should we approach breakthroughs in media representation? If racism in Western multi-ethnic democracies operates in the context of increased, not less, visibility, how do we make representation matter anew? I approach these questions by focusing attention on how Muslimness in Western television entertainment is being reimagined in the context of new industrial logics and techno-cultural possibilities enabled by streaming video services. Taking stock of shows including Ms Marvel (Disney+), Ramy (Hulu), Man Like Mobeen (BBC/Netflix), and We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4/Peacock), I develop an account of diasporic worldmaking that captures marginalized communities’ deeply felt desires for being seen and heard, the representational moves that media workers are crafting in response to these desires, and the translocal networks that diasporic media professionals are forging in order to imagine and produce new cultural worlds.

Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC). Aswin’s work explore media and cultural change in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, with a focus on media industries and institutions, formations of audiences and publics, and cultural identity and politics. He takes cultural and historical approaches to studying global media and communication with a particular focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K. He has recently completed a co-authored book – A Mobile Popular: Media, Culture, and Politics in Digital, which explores the centrality of mobile and digital media platforms to the circulation of media artifacts and new idioms of political expression that stem from creative and quotidian appropriations of popular culture. He is now shifting attention to two book-length projects – Indian Television: A Cultural History of a Postcolonial Media Industry, and Making Diasporic Worlds: A Cultural History of British South Asian Media.